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May 7th, 2010 07:00
EmailXtender Index files fills my storage area. Help please.
Hello everybody.
I'm using EmailXtender 4.81.655 + DiskXtender and a Centera storage singe two years for archiving my Exchange 2007 email cluster servers and emails. I'm using all these stuff on a Windows 2003 Ent.SP2 server.
I divided the data to 3 partition.
C: (operating system)
D: (Index and binaries) e.g. : Program Files\OTG\EmailXtender\EmailVault_Index\IndexDir\EmailVault_Index_Archive
E: (Archive)
I have to enlarge every week the D: drive because of index files. It becomes impossible to manage this storage area. Now the amount of data reached to 180 GB. Every day it adds 3 or 4 GB of data.
I think something is wrong in this situation.
Could you please redirect me to where to begin to debug this ? Do you have any advices ?
And finally an additional question : Is it a wise idea to compress D: drive and the index files on the Centera ?
Thanks in advance.
Mehmet
Wisers
2 Intern
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138 Posts
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May 10th, 2010 15:00
Hello,
I would not advise compressing the Index files on drive D. They are accessed often and to uncompress each of these files as needed would take some high overhead, mainly additional Disk I/O.
To compare with our EX/DX system we had 420MB of new Index files created today. I sorted the Index Archive folder by date and selected the current date and right-click properties to get the full size. Our environment has about 30 Gigabytes of new email each day. How does this relate to yours?
Is there anything else writing to the D drive? Do a search on the D drive for *.*, then sort the results by date to see what are the most recent files written. Are they big? Are they related to EX or is this something else?
I guess it depends on the size of your environment, but 3 to 4 Gigabytes of Index files a day is a pretty huge environment.
RKatwal
2 Intern
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600 Posts
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May 15th, 2010 00:00
Hello Mehmet,
It's a broad discussion about the disk layout for EmailXtender server(s). EX Install guide has some information on how to layout disks. Usually a good rule of thum would be to have following components on different drives (especially for large number of users to be archived):
1. OS
2. Install binaries
3. MSGCENTER
4. Indexes
5. Archive (EMX files)
6. MSMQ
7. SQL databases (if installed locally)
Secondly what we need to take care of is the disk I/O so it would be suggested to make sure disks are not cut out from the same LUNS (if SAN) as having high I/O by all processes can cause bottleneck situations.
If you are doing real time journaling and the way you mentioned your disk layout in the thread, I assume you have MSGCENTER, PAYLOAD,EmailVault and INDEXES on the same drive where EX is installed.
Should you like to move Indexes and MSGCENTER out from the current location to other location, it is doable but one should use extreme precaution while doing it.
Please remember that Indexes is something that is meant to grown with the time passing by unless you have action plan to dispose information about the data that passed the retention period.
You asked is its a good idea to compress D: then I would say, no it might not be a good ideas because if everything is on this drive other than volumes then OS will have to use cycles to compress and decompress data which will cause performance issues. Also note that MSGCENTER, EmailVault and Payload folders gets cleared on regular basis and new data gets added here, compression would not help you there.
The only thing suggested to be moved to Centera is Volumes (EMX files).
I hope this helps.
Thanks,
Rajan
DanJost
190 Posts
1
May 27th, 2010 06:00
Are you sure it is the index files? That seems huge - I had problems with the message center not clearing out in the past...Updating the rev to 4.81.1147 fixed the problem. I had to run the bad message processor against the message center directory. I opened a case and the support engineer put together an action plan for me - don't know about every support engineer there, but the one I worked with was pretty awesome.
I just checked the numbers on my system - we have roughly 500GB of archives and the indexes are around 35GB in size.
Dan
Wisers
2 Intern
•
138 Posts
0
May 27th, 2010 07:00
2 Separate EX Environments for two separate Exchange 2003 environments
Both environments have foldes and files building up in their Msgcenter. Env 1 has existed since 2007 and we had a folder for days going back to 2007 in the msgcenter. Cleaned it up following a KB article. It continues to fill up with folders. Env 2 was built end of 2009 and also has buildup of files in msgcenter.
I'm curious as to what process is responsible for cleaning up this msgcenter area, and why it fails to clean up many but not all files. Is there some other EX process that is not quite finished with the file and has a lock? I once disabled all AntiVirus realtime to ensure it was not the cause of this; no change (although I do have the proper exclusions in place, just making sure).
I need to agree with DanJost that there are some very knowledgable and helpful EMC support engineers (shout out to Oakville/GTA
)
Regarding Disk I/O and separation of disks, we actually moved our Disk infrastructure for Env 1 from a very fast very expensive SAN to a still fast but more affordable SAN that we can expand much easier as needed. After this move we do have Indexes, MsgCenter and MSMQ on the same large GPT volume. But as stated above it all depends on Disk I/O and what hardware is underneath. You could have separate volumes for each only to realize that they all come from the same disk and share the same heads = not good. As your environment grows if you have not planned the disk properly, you will see bogging down of the MSMQ queues etc. Good news is that all this disk config can be moved around using articles in the knowledgebase.
Env 1: 4.81.1147
266GB of Index files
6.51TB of Archive
Env 2: 4.81.1459
18GB of Index files
342GB of Archive